Mike Benz is exhorting the Trump administration to reconsider how they can continue America's wielding of soft power.
(LifeSiteNews) — A leading expert on government control tactics argued in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson that the U.S. will need new, creative ways to maintain its resources after its 90-day freeze on U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Mike Benz, executive director for the Foundation for Freedom Online, a free speech watchdog group, is imploring Trump’s administration to rethink how the U.S. will obtain important resources around the world now that its “dirty deeds” are under scrutiny.
Benz stressed the importance of U.S. “soft power” exercised by USAID that allows America to maintain material benefits, from those as crucial and powerful as oil, to something as small and insignificant as a pencil. The implications of this soft power will “shock people” when they begin to wrap their heads around it, according to Benz.
He pointed out that many MAGA Republicans are focused heavily on domestic issues and haven’t had reason to think through the impact of foreign entanglements. “They never had to think about how you make a pencil, and how the goods and services that give them the advantaged life that we have in the United States versus other countries depends on the battering ram of this blob apparatus,” Benz told Carlson in reference to USAID.
Benz used Milton Friedman’s example of the pencil to demonstrate how the U.S. depends on the cooperation of foreign nations to produce its goods.
“What happens if Malaysia decides to nationalize, to block exports of gum from the gum trees, and the African miners decide that they are going to go on strike and not allow graphite or lead? No blob, no pencils,” said Benz, explaining that we need a “mechanism to influence that foreign government” and, for example, “stop the nationalization law.”
“You might say you can live without pencils. But how about no petroleum? What if these are really critical resources? For us to be able to have microchips, for us to be able to have renewable batteries, for us to be able to build computers, for us to be able to put gas in our car or heating in our home. There is a potential necessity” for soft power, Benz said.
He acknowledged, however, that certain kinds of unethical operations, like USAID’s involvement in intentionally destabilizing governments, need to be off the table.
“There are some things you can't do. Assassinations. Promoting internet censorship. Full-on you know regime change … that mobilizes the ugliest assets in a society like terrorist groups or extremist groups,” Benz conceded.
Throughout the interview, Benz cited staggering examples of such operations, which have even been carried out in the U.S. itself, such as USAID’s funding of media targeting of Trump and his cohorts in order to impeach him.
For this reason alone, Benz believes USAID needs “open heart surgery.”
“I fully support the total abolition of USAID as an agency and … if at some point it needs to be rolled out, spun out into a different independent agency again with reforms in place and the appropriate staffing structure we can have that conversation in a later time.”
He maintained, however, that the U.S. still needs a way to wield soft power throughout the world.
“I mean, have your rage boiling your anger moment. And when that clears a fundamental reorganization of the way we carry out soft power is going to have to replace what we used to do if we don't do these Dirty Deeds anymore.”
Benz acknowledged that actions like drilling for oil domestically can help compensate for our foreign maneuvers to acquire resources.
“There's creative offsets that can be done to replace dirty tricks,” said Benz, suggesting that, as another example, we “reconceptualize the way we do trade” in the Middle East.
“You're going to need to think a lot more creatively about that when you don't have access to the Dirty Deeds done dirt cheap … I just want to impress that point because I think a lot of MAGA Republicans are going to think that it's easier than it is to reorganize that, and there's just a lot of surgery that needs to be done if you're going to cut that function out.”
When Carlson expressed skepticism that the U.S. is rewarded as much by USAID as Benz suggested, the free speech advocate went on to cite the economic benefits reaped by major U.S. corporations, with the assumption that “trickle-down economics” works — in other words, “What's good for ExxonMobil is good for the American citizens.”
“Look at the benefits to the stock price for Chevron and Exxon when the war broke out and the U.S. State Department strong-armed every country in Europe to divest from Russian gas, and they all were forced to buy expensive North American LNG. Their stock prices went to the moon, they had something like you know triple the profits or something for a period of months,” Benz said.
Carlson objected, “If your measure is short-term stock spikes, OK, those are pretty easy to affect. But that's not the same as like, long-term prosperity.”
Benz admitted that what’s good for big corporations may not be good for Americans, especially in today’s United States.
“In a way, it's a miracle that this is happening, because it's forcing us to confront all the related issues as we put together a more cohesive vision for U.S. soft power," Benz pointed out. "Which is that Reaganite-style, trickle-down economics may have made sense when those corporations were American corporations, with American manufacturing facilities, employing American labor. But now these are nominally American companies.”
